Alibaba Cloud expands European presence with UK Data Centres

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba Group, has announced the opening of two availability zones in the UK, in additional to its Frankfurt and Dubai data centres launched in 2016.

The company says its expansion not only extends its cloud capabilities within the Europe, but also highlights its ongoing commitment to the region. Alibaba Cloud’s local footprint is steadily increasing, with data centres across three EMEA locations: Frankfurt, Dubai, and now London.

Answering an increase in demand for Alibaba Cloud services across the EMEA region, the pair of high performance availability zones are said to assist organisations in the region to accelerate the upgrade of their digital infrastructure; enabling more efficient digital transformation initiatives. Business continuity is also a clear focus, with dual availability zones offering stronger disaster recovery capabilities.

The London location boasts 24/7 on-site support – including both security and engineering – as well real-time monitoring and a ticketing system with SLA guarantees. The new data centres are said to offer a wide range of Alibaba Cloud product lines, including: elastic computing, storage, database, network, application services and big data analytics.

With its latest facility, Alibaba Cloud now operates 52 availability zones in 19 regions around the world with more global regions set to follow.

“At Alibaba Cloud, we are – and always have been – committed to our customers. Our expansion into the United Kingdom, and by extension into Europe, is in direct response to the rapidly increasing demands we have seen for local facilities within the region,” says Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud EMEA.

“Using AI-powered and data-driven technology, our latest data centres will offer customers complete access to our wide range of cloud services from machine learning capabilities to predictive data analytics – ensuring that we continue to offer an unparalleled level of service. We are incredibly proud to take this latest step in our continued investment in EMEA.”